Why All Spiderweb Games Are Now Cheaper Forever

Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software took time to write a new entry on his blog in which he explains why he changed his policies on pricing for his games, why the price for Avadon on Steam is lower than on his own website and a few more things. As long as you’re even remotely interested in Spiderweb’s titles it’s a very interesting post, and undoubtedly worth a read. Here’s a sampling:

We released our first game in January, 1995. That is a long time ago, and much has changed. A few helpful comparisons.

Now: Huge distributors like Steam and iTunes sell massive numbers of copies for low prices, and Indie developers make good money on huge volume.
Then: The World Wide Web barely existed and we scraped by on a handful of sales from AOL.

Now: A quality Indie niche game sells on big portals for ten bucks at most. More than that and people think you’re crazy and move on.
Then: Most good shareware games sold for $25. It took me a very long time just to realize that that price isn’t normal anymore.

Now: Indie developers can make excellent livings selling lots of copies of cheap games.
Then: Indie game developers were called “shareware developers,” and everyone thought they were losers and spat on them.

Now: Want to pirate a game? It just takes 3 seconds of searching on Pirate Bay.
Then: Took five minutes of searching instead of three seconds. This actually made a big difference.

Now: Many new games are given away for free and make their money on micro-transactions from a portion of their users.
Then: FREE games? With micro-WHAT? What are you? A SORCEROR?